Yearly Archives: 2012

Sweet Pea Bruschetta with Lime Toast

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I prefer to worship at the altar of hospitality, rather than entertaining.  Entertaining parses your life into into realms.  The private realm is marked by gruel, dog food and the odd can of water chestnuts.  The entertaining realm features sourdough loaves fashioned from home-grown wheat, spit-roasted French game birds and Pakistani mango tiramisu.  You pull out and dust off this fancy life for visiting poobahs.  As far as your guests can tell, your life is a moveable feast.  Hospitality doesn’t make these distinctions.  It simply invites you into my life.  And this is where bruschetta and crostini come in.*  They’re anti-poobah food.

Garlic Love – Skordalia with Parsley Salad

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  In my personal desert island larder (you know, What would you take if you had to choose only a dozen or so dishes or ingredients  on a desert island for the rest of your life?) Skordalia with Parsley Salad would surely rate shelf space.*  And not because it includes potatoes.  But because it includes …

Sardines with Feta and Salmoriglio

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Photographing Sardines with Feta and Salmoriglio this past week reminded me of a fancy dinner where Jody and I found ourselves sitting across the table from Stephen Hawking’s literary agent, who told a story about A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME.  The original manuscript, we learned, had been an overlong demanding text several times the size of the slender volume that was eventually published.  The agent revealed how he convinced Hawking how to pare it down.  “I explained to him that every time he used a mathematical formula in his book he was going to lose half his readers.”

Hawking must have taken his advice to heart.  There’s nary a single formula in the entire story.

Friends have suggested a similar axion holds for food bloggers.  Every time you publish a photo of a fish with its head on you’re going to lose half your readers.  

Rhubarb and Rose Upside-Down Cake

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We haven’t made a cake for awhile and Rhubarb and Rose Upside-Down Cake seemed like a no-brainer. Some pale pink rhubarb for spring, a note of the exotic in the rosewater, the whole thing delivered in as folksy and unpretentious American a package as one could imagine–an upside-down cake.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

Dandelion and Mustard Green Gnocchi with Lucky Boy Onions and Pine Nuts

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This week’s Dandelion and Mustard Green Gnocchi recipe features a sauce made with wild Texas onions.  My brother Bob and his wife Monika have have a small ranch, which they call Lucky Boy, in the Hill Country a couple of hours from San Antonio.*  In one of those weird six-degrees of separation confluences friends of ours were visiting family in Texas,  who were in turn friends with my brother and his wife.  Everyone ended up at Lucky Boy for the weekend.  Our friends flew back to Boston with a Texas goodie bag filled with long slender wild onions picked from the banks of the Llano River.  We used the bulb and the pointed flower head (what locals call “the garlic”), and a few inches of tender green stem attached to each.  Most of the stem is too woody for cooking, like the tough parts of lemongrass.  If you look closely at the plate of gnocchi photographed straight down there’s a closed flower head sitting atop the dumpling in the seven o’clock position.

Seared Char with Creamed Spinach and Sorrel

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This is the easiest elegant dish you will ever make.  Seared char with creamed spinach and sorrel.  Despite my French introduction to cooking I’m not a fan of the just-add-butter-and-cream approach to life on the stove top. It’s too easy to lapse into a dish whose primary flavors are cream and butter rather than the ingredients you brought home from the store.  Nevertheless, there are combinations that ask for butter and cream.  Salmon, spinach and sorrel is one of them.

Easy Pizza with Sweet Onions, Spring Garlic, Cheese and Greens

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To knead, or not to knead, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the dough to fold, or to grunt and sweat under a weary kneading. Perchance to sleep, and in sleeping to dream of gluten–ay, there’s the rub. At least, that’s the rub with this Easy Pizza with Sweet Onions, Spring Garlic, Cheese and Greens.

To knead or not to knead, what do you think?

Steel-Cut Oats with Dukkah

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Ceci ce n’est pas une poste. This is not a post–it’s a reminder of what you can do with dukkah. In this case, breakfast: steel-cut oats with Greek yogurt, diced beets, a soft-boiled egg and dukkah. If I’d had leftover roasted carrots, or a little braised fennel, or some kale… well, you get the picture. You get a whole grain and a vegetable with some protein under your belt and you haven’t even left the house yet.
Don’t bother clicking on the MORE link. There is no more. This is it.
Ken

Pan-Roasted Cauliflower with Dukkah

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We’re going to switch things up this week for Pan-Roasted Cauliflower with Dukkah. Normally you read a title like that and you think, Okay, this is about cauliflower, and then it’s about dukkah, whatever the hell that is. It would then follow that we’d spend a lot of time nattering on about cauliflower and give you a little dukkah sub-recipe (we’re not sophisticated enough to have a site that features sidebars… yet).

But this week the cauliflower is just a tease, a way of filling the seats inside the tent so we have an audience for dukkah, the exotic headliner who’s come all the way from Egypt, an aromatic mixture of toasted nuts and seeds gussied up with a few fragrant accents.